Keith Packard, member of the XFree86 Core Team and author of the highly anticipated Render extension for X, posted an exciting screenshot Sunday to kde-devel: Konqueror displaying kde.org using antialiased text! Unfortunately the code is not ready for general use, but Keith offered a rough patch for Qt to set things in motion. Matthias Ettrich (along with many other enthusiastic core developers) expressed interest, and mentioned Keith's code may be included as soon as Qt version 2.2.3. You can read the full discussion on kde-devel, starting with Keith's initial announcement, here.

Very nice indeed, but what is still missing is a majorly updated printing system with full WYSIWYG.

Why cant´t we have something like one directory where you put any Truetype-, Type1-, CID-, etc. fonts, which are then used for both displaying and printing - without having to hack together any Fontmap and fonts.dir files.

Yes, I know there are ways to generate them automatically, but these auto-generation is not exactly always working as it should do.
Especially when you have a large number of fonts you have to spend hours adjusting Fontmap, fonts.dir, etc. so that at least printing from Qt-based-programs works roughly as it should.

Then of course there is the problem that there are many fonts (e.g. asian TTF fonts) which X11 can display but Ghostscript cannot print, at least not without patches.

If we want to beat Windoze on the desktop, this whole font problem needs to be solved.

This sort of thing is already partially solved in Manrake 7.2. Using CUPS, it is capable of rendering fonts for printing pretty well, and FontDrake allows easy font installation, and even importation of Windoze fonts.

Am I the only one who finds antialiasing overrated?
My fonts look great in KDE2/XFree4.01/Mandrake (as good as in Windows IMHO) and I doubt I will notice any significant difference. (Perhaps my monitor is blurry ;-))

It's great that you're happy... but many of us pretty much don't feel like resting until people bust out laughing and slapping thier knee when they see windoze run proclaiming they have a real desktop on thier system. ;-)

Yes. I think that's the short version. "Yes, yes you are in fact the only person who "finds" it overrated" - that would be the full version.
Few people will put up with crunchy, craggy, broken-up looking letterforms and other screen elements.

Maybe your truetpye fonts look "OK" as in passable considering it's UNIX, but your diagonals and curves in any drawing tool still look like absolute shit.

Antialiasing in general use a very good thing; cars with pneumatic tires are preferable to solid rubber or wooden wheels although strictly speaking a wheel vehicle need NOT be equipped with inflatable products from Michelin or Goodyear, still you will find few people riding in carts and wagons when faster, smoother riding transportation is available. So too with OS's that spurn what the common folk think is a comfortable interface.

OK, this isn't the killer app which will make Linux/KDE the number 1 desktop, but it is a very big move in the direction of taking users away from Windows.

When I am showing people how cool Linux looks with KDE, things go great, until we go surfing the Internet. I hit a web site such as BBC News, and the font rendering is abysmal. Having cool anti-aliased fonts will make Konqueror the browser of choice for many Linuxers (RIP Mozilla)

Notice the person that wrote the Konquie patch - Keith Packard, of XFree fame. This is not a KDE 'killer-app'. In fact, this has little to do with KDE. The screenshot is a proof-of-concept. This code is going into the XFree86 Core source tree. Hence, Mozilla, Gnome and every other X-enabled app will take equal advantage of the scw33tness.

I'm so sorry to have people like you in the Linux Community. Why the heck would we want to take away windows users? what can they do for us? WHY do we need to take them away, you fscking tell me that dude.

If all windows users would move to linux, then linux will probably shapeshift into a PURE windows CLONE. no more shell, no more full control, just a sweet GUI. and that's not what Linux is all about...

And the arrogance, thinking you can take them away... GOD! This is _NOT_ a race!

Looks pretty cool, but am I the only one which thinks the "w" looks a bit "fuzzy"?
Take a look under "Family" in the menu to see what I meen. Maybe it's just because of the way the "w" looks, that it is a bit "fuzzy".

It's not something that bothers me...I *really* would like to have this inkluded in KDE 2.1 :-)

KDE Sucks! Windoze Rules! Shut up all you ***** ****ing *****ers! HAHAHA! I AM GOD! HAHAA! U ALL SUCK! I AM L33T! shut up all you idiots! Windoze rules, and you all stink, so why dont you go **** yourselves!

Note the low self-esteem and the merciless slander without the presentation of any evidence whatsoever. Now this is trolling.

That was trollling, and I've even seen worse! So please, don't mistake just standard hacker punning and joking for trolling!

P.S. I said it once, and I'll say it again. The above trolling is just an example! I don't mean it! I support KDE and linux. I've even done a little coding to help support it.

I have babbled about this feature since I saw X the first time, and now (a long time after) it is here.... YEEEESSSS! Now talking about Qt.. Is this meant to be implemented in a way that ALL text can be antialiased? Like also Konsole? (I would like to c clear 10pix) As someone else said, "... in KDE 2.1 ????". Well.. I hope so.. but with 13 days to beta realese it doesn't sound plausible... or does it? Anyway, this is worth waiting for 2.2 over, since this is exactly the kinda things that make M$ users ENVY us freeminded and independent beings, whith sooo cooool looking DT's./kidcat

I have babbled about this feature since I saw X the first time, and now (a long time after) it is here.... YEEEESSSS! Now talking about Qt.. Is this meant to be implemented in a way that ALL text can be antialiased? Like also Konsole? (I would like to c clear 10pix) As someone else said, "... in KDE 2.1 ????". Well.. I hope so.. but with 13 days to beta realese it doesn't sound plausible... or does it? Anyway, this is worth waiting for 2.2 over, since this is exactly the kinda things that make M$ users ENVY us freeminded and independent beings, whith sooo cooool looking DT's./kidcat

All talk about hideous looking fonts in X makes me wonder if all these people actually are referring to the scalable Type1 and TrueType fonts, or if they're using non-scalable bitmap fonts that look real blocky when used for big text.
For me there's no huge difference between the same TrueType font used with X and with Windows. Sure, it's smoother under Windows with antialiasing, but not *that* much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I find it hard to believe that antialiasing would make a bitmap font look great in X.

I agree. If one spends the time (only about 30 minutes) to bring over all the MS TrueType fonts into KDE, it looks wonderful. The Antialiasing adds a little, but the real improvement is going from bitmap to TrueType... I think that should be stressed.

Keith Packard, member of the XFree86 Core Team and author of the highly anticipated Render extension for X, posted an exciting screenshot Sunday to kde-devel: Konqueror displaying kde.org using antialiased text!.

Duhhh...Perhaps to let other ftp sites mirror ftp.kde.org :)Otherwise it will take two days before anyone can download anything and the server will be down. There are probably thousands of users out there who look at the ftp.kde.org and when they notice anything the fire off a mail to freshmeat...